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Welcome to Josh Baker's Practical Advice for Optimizing Your Internet Marketing blog. Here you will find internet marketing optimization and online strategy articles full of tips, tricks, discussions, and thoughts to help you take your marketing and business to the next level of success.

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Behavioral retargeting, for those that haven’t worked with it yet as discussed in this article is a form of online advertising where your ads are redelivered to visitors whom recently visited your website and didn’t complete a pre-determined desired action during their visit. In other words in an overly simplistic explanation (more clarity is described in the next paragraph), the user visits your website, doesn’t complete your desired action and then leaves and is continued to be shown your advertising on websites that they visit after yours in order to get them to return back to your website and then gives you another chance to close the “deal”. The theory behind it is that the visitor has shown some engagement with your site or brand by initially visited your website and therefore is a prime person to retarget more of your advertising to and to continue the marketing conversation with them. This allows you to draw them back in an attempt to make the conversion again by providing multiple contacts with that same prospect within a short period of time.

For example, a visitor comes to your website and views a page or multiples pages and then leaves. That same visitor goes to other websites after your website and your advertising is shown to them on those websites. Now to be completely clear, your retargeting ads won’t show on every website that visitor goes to after yours; it has to be a web site that is part of same advertising network as the retargeting platform you are working with. Usually, the ad network will have you place some pixels or tracking codes on your website so when a visitor comes to your website information will be stored in a cookie in their browser so that when they leave and go to another website in their network it knows to show them your advertising.

Many people mix up marketing strategy and tactics. If you search the internet you will find many references to both that are incorrectly referenced and used. Simplistically speaking, marketing strategy is your idea; or how you will reach your specific and measurable goal. Marketing tactics are the actions that you use to make your idea (strategy) come to life.

Let’s look at an example of marketing strategy vs. tactics fall in place from the top down:Read More→

Google Website Optimizer announced this week that there is a potential security issue with their Website Optimizer. The basics of the vulnerability is that it would allow an attacker to execute malicious code on your site using a Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attack, but only if the website or browser had already been compromised by a separate attack. Google says that the probability of the attack is low but that you should take the necessary action to protect your site from it.

Google has fixed the bug and any new experiments created on or after December 3, 2010 are not vulnerable. But if you have any experiments running that were created before December 3rd, or that are paused or stopped that were created before that date you will need to update the code.

They have given two options to update your code which can be found here in the Official Google Website Optimizer blog post titled Update Your Website Optimizer scripts to secure your site, but your choices are to either stop your experiments and create new ones, or update the code on your running experiments directly. Google states that creating a new experiment is the simpler way between the two options.

When you need to permanently change the URL of a web page or your entire website, and you want your new and returning visitors and the search engines to find your new web page it’s recommended to use a search-engine friendly 301 redirect. A 301 redirect is the HTTP status code for “moved permanently”.

Some common situations for when you want to implement a 301 redirect are:

You want to move your entire web site to a new domain for example if you want to change the domain name of your website or you are merging 2 websites into 1 website location.

You changed the URL of an existing web page to a new URL, or updated the URL of an older web page where the old URL may still exist in user bookmarks, incoming links from other websites, or indexed in the search engines.

Google this week gave its URL shortener its own website location today at http://goo.gl, allowing users now a direct way to access it.

Google defends the need for the Social Media users and world to have another URL shortener in their official Social Web Blog post Google URL Shortener Gets a Website that the difference is goo.gl will “focus on quality. With goo.gl, every time you shorten a URL, you know it will work, it will work fast, and it will keep working. You also know that when you click a goo.gl shortened URL, you’re protected against malware, phishing and spam using the same industry-leading technology we use in search and other products.”